An Investigation on the Performance of Intra-site and Inter-site Coordinated Multipoint LTE-A Networks

Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) is a novel interference mitigating technique that can alleviate or even exploit the inter-cell interference as a beneficial signal in the homogenous and heterogeneous cellular mobile networks. Coordinated scheduling/coordinated beamforming (CS/CB) is one of the CoMP schemes that suppresses the inter-cell interference within a set of coordinating cells, thereby improving the performance of mobile users, particularly those located at cell edges. This article aims to evaluate the cell coordination benefits offered by CS/CB scheme in the homogenous cellular networks. Specifically, we investigate the throughput and spectral efficiency performance of CS/CB in the intra-site and inter-site scenarios. Simulation results suggest that CS/CB-CoMP scheme can bring noticeable performance gains compared to the conventional non-coordination scheme. Further, we observe that inter-site CoMP offers improved performance than intra-site CoMP due to reduced inter-cluster interference.